The Vaulters
'' An ancient faction, the Vaulters suffered continual setbacks in trying to establish a permanent home for themselves. Not so much restless wanderers as adaptable pragmatists, their centuries of travel and tinkering have made them skilled at both science and warfare. Defense remains their preferred military strategy, and their grim tenacity makes them effective defenders. They have a tradition of appointing female leaders, and their history of escaping and surviving to fight another day continually reaffirms it.'' Description The Vaulters left the planet of Auriga when potentially cataclysmic geo-atmospheric problems were detected. Having left their homes, gods, and many of their people behind them, the dream of regaining these things has gained an almost mythical status. They are a stubborn, resilient people that have spent centuries seeking a home. Stranded on the world of Auriga, they had to survive the harsh climate and even harsher neighbors. In a years-long effort, they managed to repair their ancient colony ship, the Argosy, and once again depart before the dying planet became their grave. Once more among the stars, the people that now call themselves the Aurigans still seek traces of their past as well as a safe place to build their future. Lore The Vaulters are the descendants of the crew and cargo of the Argosy, a Mezari penal Arkship that crashed on the world of Auriga. Stranded, isolated and without any technology to properly repair and refuel the crashed dreadnought, the surviving Vaulters salvaged what they could from the wreck and set about making a foothold on the strange yet beautiful planet. They found vast underground labyrinths under Auriga's surface and built great halls and fortress cities there. As summers and winters passed, the Vaulters had finally found peace and prosperity. Skilled in mining, crafting and studying Auriga, knowledge of what came before became lost in legendary myths that were now largely ignored, and eventually forgotten. Centuries later an "event" triggered The Great Quake, labyrinths collapsed on the Vaulter's cities and cracked open their halls revealing long forgotten relics and secrets that shared their patterns and images. A race beaten and their underground homes decimated, the Vaulters fled the destruction, taking the newly acquired relics and technology with them to surface where they were met with an uncertain and dangerous journey. After finding Opbot in a forgotten cavern, the Vaulters rediscovered the Argosy with his help. After facing civil wars and the worst of foes Auriga could offer, the Vaulters repaired the ship as much as they could and left the dying planet behind, alongside the Sisters of Mercy, using Opbot as the ship's power source. As the Argosy escaped Auriga's atmosphere, another group of survivors that escaped the planet in an abandoned Hissho ship had a powerful device explode in the ship's cargo bay when it jumped. The explosion was so powerful that it destroyed the Argosy's propulsion systems, leaving it drifting across the depths of space for millennia. Opbot kept the ship and its cryopods running for centuries, as the Argosy traveled the void of space. Just when it seemed he would shut down and doom the Vaulters, the Argosy flew close to the Lodestone of the Nine, a powerful Endless rejuvenation field, that restored Opbot's systems and the ship's engines, saving the Vaulters and giving them a new chance to rebuild. Leadership Bearing the title she held before the centuries of cryo-sleep, Ilona Zolya, the First of the Bloodline, is the uncontested leader of the people once nicknamed "Vaulters". The Zolya family have been hereditary rulers for generations, and the continued survival of her people attests to the excellence of their dedication and training. While the structure might appear to be a monarchy, in reality the various guilds and families provide checks and balances that limit the power of the First. With a strong, shared sense of tradition and community, the Aurigans under Zolya hope to find a lasting home somewhere in the forbidding darkness of the galaxy. Homeworld Before she died, Auriga was a garden planet, and the body of one of one of the last survivors of the Lost, a race of god-like beings from which Dust originally came from. Auriga housed the Husk of Knowledge, the greatest site for the study of xenobiology created by the genius of the Concrete Endless. A towering achievement of industry and science, the surface and crust of the planet were a warren of laboratories, biospheres, and research centers, with myriad experiments run on both natives like the Allayi, the Guardians, and the Drakken and alien lifeforms like the Kapaku. A site of major conflict during the Dust Wars, the planet never fully recovered from the damage done by the Virtuals' assault. Over the millennia, the environment degraded and the surface of the planet was covered in ice. While there are rumors and expeditions that claim to have uncovered miraculous ruins and the vestiges of great empires, today Auriga is an icy tomb. The Aurigans have no homeworld anymore; they were driven from Auriga by its inevitable decline and seek to find a new one. While the Argosy fulfills this role for the moment, it is clear that they must find a suitable planet and establish a colony as quickly as possible. Time is running out for the ship, and therefore the Aurigans themselves. Society Split by necessity into two peoples, the Aurigans on the Argosy hope to find and establish a colony in time to return and rescue those who stayed behind on Auriga. They are led by the leader formally referred to as "First of the Bloodline", though their intermarriage with other Aurigan humanoids has made them genetically more diverse and resilient. They still feel a strong connection with those who were stranded, of course, and dream of returning to find them alive. Before the Argosy, their society had traditionally been structured along roughly feudal lines, with "Protectors" in the role of aristocracy and a priesthood of the Great Orrery looking after spiritual matters. Numerous cataclysms and the apocalypse of the planet have shaken the power of the church, leading the Aurigans to evolve into what would be called a constitutional or federal monarchy. However, while their faith in the divine has been shaken, their faith in the First of the Bloodline remains unwavering. Mechanics The vaulters have a few major twists on colonization, and movement; once settled on a planet they're fairly "vanilla" in their gameplay and planet management. They also have a big twist to "system development" which is normally done with luxury resources. Involuntary Nomads (colonization): The Vaulters don't have colony ships. They have one, single "master" ship for colonization, called the Argosy. Most factions will "consume" their colony ship upon founding an outpost, making it necessary to build more; the Vaulters instead will have the Argosy become disabled for a few turns immediately after colonization, in the hangar of the new system. The act of colonization for them is instant; there is no "outpost" period. If a system isn't occupied by opponents, the selected planet will immediately become a full, operational colony. It's worth noting that for balance reasons, they can't do this if any enemy has an outpost on any of the planets; if they could, they could time it right to waste the very large amounts of effort most factions have to put into food shipments to get really earlygame colonies, and thus could bully an enemy that spawned immediately adjacent to them into struggling to actually complete any new colonies (this would be an issue in i.e. random map layouts). They can choose to eliminate any enemy colonies the same way any other faction does - by moving in military ships and blockading it, and once this is done the system is free for you to colonize. They're gated in their colonization speed by a special "extra cost" to colonization - after colonizing a system, they'll be able to use the argosy again in a very short amount of time (2-3 turns), but if they want to actually settle with it, there will be an enormous additional cost of (usually a few thousand), and a cost of and . Every turn this cost will decrease substantially, until after about ~10 turns it has reduced to zero. What this means is that there's a hard ceiling on how quickly the vaulters can colonize, but there's also a much, much more imposing "soft ceiling" that can be overcome by picking some clever settlement locations and securing an enormous supply of the two strategic resources - that, and dust. Involuntary Nomads (homeworld): The vaulters also don't start on a unique "home system". In fact, they don't start out with a system at all - they start out with their Argosy colonizer, sitting on top of a special anomaly, and have to manually seek out a system to actually settle. This gives you a bit of flexibility in your choice of system. The unique anomaly is a "regeneration field"; if this is overlapped by your influence circle, it provides a modest amount of dust and a powerful amount of ship regen. Involuntary Nomads (golden ages): Since the Vaulters may be forced to wander around before colonizing, they're also given a bonus that tallies up for every turn the argosy is technically ready to colonize, but during which you haven't yet colonized. This is really just a "consolation prize" for taking a while to form a colony, and also exists to help keep their colonies from starving due to their "Black Thumbs" food malus by giving them a boost during the period of time it takes to erect e.g. Drone Networks. The specific bonus given by a Golden Age is: +25 on System, +25 on Empire, +15 on System, +10 on Empire, and +5 on System, as well as -50% Influence Conversion Rate on System. Metafolding: The vaulters can build portals. Portals are either a building, or late in the game, a capital ship module, which allows special movement. Specifically - any fleet can travel from a node with portals on it to any other node with portals in a single turn of movement, no matter how far away. Like a wormhole, this will immediately consume all movement points. Allies are allowed to use your portals. Portals are useable by military ships, and by the visible civilian ships that transport population units (the vaulters probably have the single safest means to shuffle their pop types around). However, they cannot be used to link together trade routes. If you give a ship movement orders, it will default to using the shortest possible path offered by the portal network, rather than the shortest geometric path (which is to say, the ships are clever about optimizing your path for you). Portal usage is automatic, and just part of plotting regular ship movement; it's not an explicit fleet action that needs to be performed. Corsairs (privateers): The vaulters can perform the same "privateers" action other factions can, by disguising their ships as pirates. This allows them to fight battles, even with allies, and even against ground targets (if invaded and defeated, an enemy system will become a "hunting ground" that's fair game for settlement. Unlike other factions, they can do this with more than just the ships bought off of the marketplace - they can also do it with their faction-unique ships as well. The most important thing about this is that it can be done immediately from the start of the game; it doesn't require teching to the rather late-game point at which most other factions can get the tech. Corsairs (pirate relations): The vaulters can perform a special action, called the "Non-Aggression Pact", with a single buyout of influence, to force a "Cordial" rating with the pirate league. This does not alter your actual "friendship" rating with the Pirate League; if they're unhappy with you, the cumulative value will remain at a low rating that would normally result in hostility, but the actual behavior will be hard-locked to a "cordial" setting for a temporary period of time - 10 turns on Normal Speed. You are still free to befriend the pirate league via the regular method, that of dust-based bribes, which all other factions have access to. Regardless of which method you use, there's also another special Vaulter-only bonus to befriending pirates: if you're at a cordial rating, pirate bases act as useable portal nodes. Traits Population Traits Vaulters start with one population type, and--depending on your actions--can unlock one of two additional possible populations at the very end of their campaign. Unlike the United Empire, these do not replace your empire citizens; rather, they're merely a small population present on one single distant world you discover. Because of this, unless you managed an extreme beeline towards the end of the faction quest, these could largely be considered a storyline novelty rather than a core play strategy. Vaulters Foundlings Bereaved Political Traits Vaulters Foundlings Bereaved Ships A recurring theme with Vaulter ships is a high number of Defense/Utility wildcard slots; you have the flexibility to make a fast, fragile fleet, or a slow, durable fleet (or any number of other useful modifiers like weapon-enhancers used in utility slots). Rather than having colonizers like most factions, the Vaulters have the Argosy, which behaves differently. Cryogenic-Colonizer Strategic Implications There is only one Argosy; you do not and cannot build more. Like the Vodyani Arks, it can be repaired if destroyed, but (similarly) if it's destroyed at the absolute start of the game before you found your first colony, there's nobody available to repair it, so you're screwed (that's a game over condition). Rather than being consumed when it builds a colony, the Argosy can repeatedly found them (more on these mechanics are described above, in the faction description). The Argosy starts extremely fast, and starts with an extremely large vision radius. Later in the game you can get a modest upgrade to give it another Defense/Utility slot, which boosts its travel speed, but by then you likely have portals at most distant planets. Explorer Strategic Implications Attacker Strategic Implications Protector Strategic Implications Coordinator Strategic Implications Hunter Strategic Implications Carrier Strategic Implications Portal (System Improvement, Metafolding affinity) * +10 * Allows the teleportation of fleets between two systems containing this improvement. Note: Trade Routes and Trading Companies do not use Portal routes, they are military-only. * Upkeep: 16 Cost: 160 , 5 , 5 "The Vaulters extensive use of portals on Auriga, plus their advanced knowledge of and Strategic Resources, allows them to teleport fleets between systems." Potential Population Quest Rewards These are the rewards for a quest any faction can receive simply for having >10 Vaulters population on at least two systems. Quick Learners * Strat Recycler: (Support Module) +1 , +1 per destroyed CP on fleet. Cost: 50 , 500 (!). This has a brutal upfront cost, but it does give you an entirely novel way to make precisely the strategic resources Vaulters need to accelerate colony settlement. The main draw here is it's income "above and beyond" the naturally available supply. * Deepspace Dust Scoop: (Support Module) +5 /Turn. Cost: 100 , 3 . Yes, this just passively gives you money for having fleets sitting around doing nothing. A few of these will offset the upkeep cost of most fleets. 3 is a bit pricey, but it's basically trading strats for gold. Potential Unique Faction Quest Rewards Gallery Vaulter mood boardingParty 2.png Vaulter mood ritual v2.jpg Vaulters Hero 1.3.jpg Vaulters version tribale Scientifique.jpg Vaulters version tribale Militaire.jpg Vaulters Hero 4.jpg Vaulters Hero 3.jpg Vaulters Hero 2.4.jpg Category:Factions